Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime performance during the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles has set the internet—and much of the world—abuzz. Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult is the most banned book in America for challenging the way people see the world. I’m sure those same folks will be coming for Kendrick’s thirteen minutes for challenging the way the world operates.

Less than a week later, scholars, pontificators and fools offered hot takes, deep dives, and debates about every minute of the performance. Those versed in Black scholarship loved it. Others criticized it. And, there were plenty of opinions and outright lies circulating. But here’s what’s undeniable: 133.5 million people watched the halftime show at Caesars Superdome, making it the most-watched in Super Bowl history. According to Roc Nation, Apple Music and the NFL, this number beats those who watched the Fox broadcast of the game which averaged 126 Million viewers. That 7.5 million more tuning into halftime than game time.

Context is King: History of the Halftime Show

Let’s talk about origins. The Super Bowl, the annual championship game of the NFL, has been played since 1967, with college marching bands providing halftime entertainment.

Grambling State University, a HBCU had its marching band perform at Super Bowl II (1968).

In 1972, the first halftime show featuring a Black performer, non-marching band member, was Ella Fitzgerald at Super Bowl VI in Miami where she sang Mack the Knife.

Super Bowl IX (1975) in New Orleans paid tribute to Duke Ellington with Grambling State’s Marching Band and the Mercer Ellington Orchestra.

When was the next Black moment? We have to skip a bunch of years to get to 1991, Super Bowl XXV where the incomparable Whitney Houston delivered a stirring rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, but she wasn’t the halftime headliner—New Kids on the Block were. In 1993, Michael Jackson, the 1st Black performer to headline the halftime show dazzles the crowds at Super Bowl XXVII (27) and sets the standard for pop stars and the future of football’s biggest event. The King of Pop owned the stage and every moment of his performance. If 100,000 people had actually turned off their TVs like they claimed they did, Michael Jackson would still hold the record, with an audience of 133.4 million viewers.

Other notable performances featuring Black artists across the lengthy history of halftime shows include:

• Super Bowl XXII (22nd, 1988) – Chubby Checker appears with the Rockettes and 88 grand piano players.

• Super Bowl XXIX (29th, 1995) – Patti LaBelle & Teddy Pendergrass were featured along with Tony Bennett.

• Super Bowl XXX (30th, 1996) – Diana Ross dazzled in a red gown and even changed outfits mid-show.

• Super Bowl XXXI (31st, 1997) – A blend of James Brown appearing with ZZ Top and The Blues Brothers Band.

• Super Bowl XXXII (32nd, 1998) – A Motown tribute featured The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, Queen Latifah, and Boyz II Men. Watching those young men of Boyz II Men sing about their mothers hits differently now, especially juxtaposed with Lamar’s solitary silhouette atop the GNX in New Orleans and his dancers, young men gathered under a street lamp.

• Super Bowl XXXIII (33rd, 1999) – Stevie Wonder joins Gloria Estefan and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

• Super Bowl XXXIV (34th, 2000) – Toni Braxton is featured.

• Super Bowl XXXV (35th, 2001) – Featured Mary J. Blige and Nelly.

• Super Bowl XXXVIII (38th, 2004) – Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” occurred.

• Super Bowl XLI (41st, 2007) – Prince performed in the rain, delivering one of the most iconic halftime shows in history.

• Super Bowl XLV (45th, 2011) – Usher and the Prairie View A&M University Marching Storm supported The Black Eyed Peas.

• Super Bowl XLVI (46th, 2012) – Madonna headlined with Nicki Minaj and CeeLo Green at Lucas Oil Stadium.

• Super Bowl XLVII (47th, 2013) – Beyoncé tore down the Superdome in New Orleans, reuniting with Destiny’s Child.

• Super Bowl 50 (2016) – Beyoncé returned, performing a Black Panther-inspired set supporting headliner Coldplay.

• Super Bowl LIII (53rd, 2019) – Big Boi and Travis Scott performed in Atlanta.

• Super Bowl LV (55th, 2021) – The Weeknd headlined in Tampa.

• Super Bowl LVI (56th, 2022) – Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige, and 50 Cent rocked SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

• Super Bowl LVII (57th, 2023) – Rihanna, pregnant and powerful, delivered her first live show in over five years.

• Super Bowl LVIII (58th, 2024) – Usher commanded the stage in Las Vegas.

• Super Bowl LIX (59th, 2025) – Kendrick Lamar featuring SZA.

So, let’s be clear: Black performers at the Super Bowl are not new. Hip-hop and rap at the Super Bowl are not new. For those suddenly enraged—why weren’t you bothered during the 39 other years when Black artists weren’t featured or headlined? The selection process has always been based on merit—the most talented for the job, period. Right?

And with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) now the new taboo, let me ask: Why do some get upset when things aren’t diverse—when people who look like them aren’t centered or given an extra slot or quota on stage? Do you want equity and inclusion or not?

Kendrick Lamar is highly qualified. He won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his album DAMN. He’s a 27-time Grammy winner, and one cannot deny that his 2024 diss track, Not Like Us, has the world on fire. Please, show me someone with better credentials who’s willing to perform a 13-minute Super Bowl halftime show—for free.

Let’s Dive into the Performance

Lights flash. I see nine squares and glowing X’s and O’s. I wonder—are we about to get Tic-Tac-Toe or something else? In the background, a power bar, formed of stadium lights or drones, begins to load. I know we’re about to witness something special.

More lights flash. The bar is almost at 100%, and I sit on the edge of my seat, expecting a high level of storytelling artistry from Lamar. According to Britannica, art is a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination—and right now, skill and imagination are exactly what we need.

In a flash, a “Start Here” sign and arrow appear, pointing to the lone figure on the hood of a Buick GNX. Kendrick Lamar, a young Black man, crouches on the car. The image evokes loneliness—it’s dramatic, and I’m locked in as the gleaming black Buick GNX (Grand National Experimental) transforms into a clown car, packed with dancers spilling out. So many exit the vehicle that I later learn the seating had to be removed to fit them all into that tight, cramped space—not unlike bodies crammed into the hulls of ships.

On Instagram, Lamar writes about authenticity: “In the moment of confusion, the best thing you can do is find a GNX. Make you realize the only thing that matters in life is that original paperwork. That TL2 code. 1 of 547.”

What does original paperwork mean when you’re the descendant of chattel slavery? Is it the slave ship’s manifest that documented the theft of ancestors? The bill of sale from massas in the States or Grand Blancs in the Caribbean, depending on where your roots were auctioned off? Or is it the manumission papers, declaring your freedom—bought at a price?

This leads me down another rabbit hole: authenticity—who is American and who is not? In a country that often forgets to be kind to the foreigner (Leviticus 19:33-34), or that it was founded by immigrants—many seeking religious freedom, a fresh economic start, or escape from oppression—this question cuts deep. It’s a scar that never fully heals.

Did you know that, in the past—like I wrote about in Island Queen—people with any tint to their skin have had to carry manumission papers or proof of their free status to avoid being accosted? Many around the nation feel this burden now. We’re still caught in this cycle because we’ve banned the books that teach history and empathy.

Back to Football—America’s Game

I highly recommend reading Moving the Chains: The Civil Rights Protest That Saved the Saints and Transformed New Orleans by Erin Grayson Sapp, which examines the 1965 AFL All-Star Game boycott, where players protested against racial discrimination in New Orleans.

Another must-read is Race and Football in America: The Life and Legacy of George Taliaferro by Dawn Knight, chronicling the journey of George Taliaferro, the first African American drafted by an NFL team, and the challenges he faced.

Red, White, & Blues of Uncle Sam

The visuals cut to Uncle Sam—portrayed by Academy Honorary Award winner Samuel L. Jackson. With a film career grossing over $27 billion worldwide, making him the highest-grossing actor of all time, Jackson embodies this iconic American figure. Some might be wondering, What in the DEI is going on with this Black version of a fictional Americana, but it soon becomes clear: Uncle Sam is here to keep Lamar in line.

Jackson plays Uncle Sam as Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist novel, portrayed White men as morally bankrupt and Black individuals as either complicit in oppression or suffering under it. The book also depicted White women as the moral conscience of a system they benefited from, yet remained angelic through their Christian preaching. The novel ends with the enslaved Tom dying because he refuses to betray two Black women who have escaped. As he dies, he forgives his abusers.

The novel’s humane portrayal of enslaved people and its righteous female characters were said to have contributed to the start of the Civil War. Enraged Southerners banned the book. In the 1940s, Langston Hughes attempted to revive interest in it, but Richard Wright and James Baldwin criticized it, arguing that it promoted the image of an “Uncle Tom”—a Black person subservient to Whites or complicit in oppression.

In Lamar’s performance, Uncle Sam enforces the “party line” of American success. At times, he antagonizes Lamar, telling him, “You’re too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” He dictates that since Lamar refuse to comply with the rules of the American game, he must be penalized: “Deduct one life.”

The death count is brutal—and so is American history, even without including the countless lives lost under enslavement:

• Fort Pillow Massacre (1864): Confederate soldiers slaughtered surrendering African American Federal troops stationed at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Between 277 and 295 Union troops were killed.

• Memphis Massacre (1866): A White mob murdered 46 African Americans, most of whom were Union veterans.

• New Orleans Massacre (1866): A White mob killed 35 Black citizens and wounded 100 for peacefully gathering in support of a political meeting.

• Colfax Massacre (1873): A White militia massacred approximately 150 African American militia members who were attempting to surrender in Colfax, Louisiana.

• Wilmington Massacre (1898): A premeditated attack left 60 Black Americans dead as White supremacists sought to eliminate African American participation in government and permanently disenfranchise Black citizens.

• Atlanta Race Riot (1906): White mobs killed at least 12 African Americans and burned over 1,000 homes and businesses in Black neighborhoods.

• Springfield Race Riot (1908): The Illinois state militia was called to quell the chaos as a White mob shot innocent people, burned homes, looted stores, and mutilated and lynched Black residents.

• Chicago Race Riot (1919): The “Red Summer” began when a Black youth was stoned to death for swimming in an area reserved for Whites. Over 13 days of lawlessness, 23 African Americans were killed, 537 were injured, and 1,000 Black families were left homeless.

• Ocoee Massacre (1920): A massacre of Black residents in Ocoee, Florida, left approximately 30 dead.

• Tulsa Race Massacre (1921): Tulsa’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, known as Black Wall Street, was destroyed—1,400 homes and businesses burned, nearly 10,000 people left homeless. Vanessa Miller’s The Filling Station is a poignant portrayal of the massacre and the resilient rebuilding that followed.

The sacrifice of Black lives makes Lamar’s imagery of tangled bodies forming the flag raw. It hit me in the pit of my stomach. I live knowing that the sacrifices and body counts will continue to rise, forming trending hashtags: #BreonnaTaylor #AhmaudArbery #TamirRice #TrayvonMartin #GeorgeFloyd

The Movement of Dancers

The visuals of Black dancers dressed in red, white, and blue moving around what is now clearly the game receiver mirror how many of us are on the X button—saying yes to conforming, to getting along, to advancing, to avoiding having our dreams burned up by a jealous or misinformed mob. When the dancers near the circle stage—the reject button—they enter a staircase that leads to a slope, which brings them back to where they started. Is that a metaphor suggesting we are better off right where we began before chasing conformance?

The Most Misunderstood Part: Serena Williams

Serena Williams, who once dated Drake, danced the Crip Walk on stage. Distraught commentators ground their teeth, calling it disrespectful for a forty-year-old mother to be dancing on the figurative grave of her ex.

The caucasity of this is the belief that this exhibition was about a man or a former relationship. Serena Williams is not just some “baby mother.” She was ranked No. 1 in the world in women’s singles by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for 319 weeks—the third-most of all time. Williams has won 73 WTA Tour-level singles titles, including 23 major women’s singles titles. She is the only player to accomplish a career Golden Slam in both singles and doubles.

The Crip Walk is a celebration, notably adopted by her folks from her city of Compton, and it symbolizes the alliance of California street gangs, the Crips— as in Crips vs. Bloods. No, Serena is not part of a gang. But like the dance’s founder, Henry Crip—a Harlem dance legend who lost an arm and a leg in a car accident—she celebrates moving forward and achieving. Williams first did the Crip Walk in 2012 at Wimbledon, eliciting massive backlash for celebrating a huge win—for the girl from Compton.

Seeing her dance freely, hair flowing, I think of the Tignon Laws of New Orleans, which I mentioned in my podcast Consent in the Time When a Black Woman Can Say No, and the long history of policing Black women’s bodies. In Serena, I saw joy and celebration. If I am to think of Drake at all—a man who has used Serena’s name in diss songs—I see freedom from a toxic relationship. That’s cathartic.

Ok, Now the Hotep Or Too Deep to be Real Take

Lamar does say he is a stargazer, so maybe the 16 stars on Uncle Sam’s jacket resemble the Little Dipper. if I squint, I can see it. But the talk online about the design representing the 16 free states—states that prohibited slavery between 1850 and 1858—seems like a stretch. These arbitrary dates are supposedly tied to U.S. naval activities interrupting the slave trade.

I’m not buying this. The U.S. Navy’s role against stopping transport began in 1820 when warships deployed off West Africa tried to catch American slave ships, but enforcement was sporadic until the Navy deployed a permanent African Squadron in 1842. Last time I checked, 1850 and 1842 are different years. A rounding error won’t make them the same.

By 1858, there were 32 states in the Union, including Minnesota, which was admitted on May 11, 1858. California was the 31st state, admitted on September 9, 1850. If I count the list of free states—states that prohibited slavery—I get 17:

1. Pennsylvania – December 12, 1787

2. New Jersey – December 18, 1787

3. Connecticut – January 9, 1788

4. Massachusetts – February 6, 1788

5. New Hampshire – June 21, 1788

6. New York – July 26, 1788

7. Rhode Island – May 29, 1790

8. Vermont – March 4, 1791

9. Ohio – March 1, 1803

10. Indiana – December 11, 1816

11. Illinois – December 3, 1818

12. Maine – March 15, 1820

13. Michigan – January 26, 1837

14. Iowa – December 28, 1846

15. Wisconsin – May 29, 1848

16. California – September 9, 1850

17. Minnesota – May 11, 1858

So the math and the facts aren’t jiving. Kendrick Lamar is very precise in his lyrics. An arbitrary number or pattern doesn’t seem to be his M.O. I could stretch and say he mentions losing 16 friends in his song “wacced out murals,” but then I’m just spitballing.

Not everything has a direct meaning, but that’s the beauty of art—it can mean many different things to different people. Kendrick Lamar and his performance is art and it should be applauded for making us all stop and think.

Ending the American Game

As the last notes of “Not Like Us” finishes, Lamar and company launch into “TV Off.” When he finishes the rap, he holds up a virtual remote, turns it off, and forces the stage to go dark. In lights, we see the sign: Game Over. Does he mean the American game is over because we refuse to learn from the past or that he’s stop playing the game? Lights out—Is that symbolic of a Revolution being televised until it’s not? Is the American Game going to stop feeding on Black life, Black culture, and Black breath? What happens if every American, turns off the TV, the cellphone, social media, etc. and stops playing the game?

America is founded with the God-given right to have differences of opinions. Of being able to choose your path, to dream the biggest dreams, and to make them happen—on or off the field. Whether we play the game or not, movement, not standing still, is how we inch forward toward the goal posts. It’s how we will awaken and form a more perfect union.

You can learn more about banned books from the American Library Association (ALA), PEN America, and Authors Against Book Bans.

Show notes include a list of books I’ve mentioned in the broadcast. This week, I’m spotlighting Brave and Kind Books through Bookshop.org.

Miller, Vanessa, (2025) The Filling Station. HarperCollins.

Picoult, Jodi. (2007). Nineteen Minutes. Atria Books.

Riley, Vanessa. (2021). Island Queen. William Morrow.

Hughes, Langston. (2000). Simple’s Uncle Sam

Lamar, Kendrick. (2017). DAMN [Album]. Top Dawg Entertainment.

Lamar, Kendrick. (2024). GNX [Album]. Top Dawg Entertainment.

Sapp, E. G. (2019). Moving the Chains: The civil rights protest that saved the Saints and transformed New Orleans. Louisiana State University Press.

Smith, A. W., & Hailey, W. (2020). Race and Football in America: The life and legacy of George Taliaferro. Indiana University Press.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. (1852) Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Images are screenshots of ROC Nation and Apple Music feeds.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-02-18 14:10:00.

“For the women who do right.

For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.

For the women who burn it all down, find beauty in ashes.

For the dreamers left behind—keep sailing.”

That is the dedication of Fire Sword and Sea. Four lines that came to me as a battle cry. It’s a reminder that womanhood, especially when tied to leadership, has never been a straight line. It bends, curves, breaks, and rebuilds. It demands courage. It requires clarity. And sometimes, it lusts for fire.

Recently, a friend—someone who does not read much historical fiction—got an early look at Fire Sword and Sea. She’s a reader of self-help, of business strategy, of the occasional thriller you can sneak into her hands. But she said something that stopped me cold:

“Vanessa, you wrote a book about leadership—about women’s leadership.”

At first, I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Yes, my heroine Jacquotte Delahaye is a pirate captain. And yes, pirate captains are leaders by definition. But what my friend saw was something deeper—something I wasn’t consciously aiming for but had apparently woven into every scene, every strike of a sword.

On a pirate ship in the 1600s, leadership wasn’t inherited; it was earned. Pirate vessels operated like meritocracies—any race, any nationality could join, as long as they could pull their weight. Jacquotte rises the only way a woman in that era could: in disguise. Hidden behind lies, she relies on her skill with a rapier, her mastery of the sea, her stamina and grit, and her ability to steer a stolen ship through storms both literal and moral.

Pirates didn’t buy their ships. They took them. And Jacquotte climbs the ladder of command one impossible task at a time.

Through Fire Sword and Sea, we see her rise, her missteps, her victories, her bruises—physical and spiritual. And that, my friend said, is leadership.

But leadership—especially women’s leadership—is a complicated beast.

We often talk about the women who lead in boardrooms, in startups, in medicine, in politics. But historically—and even now—women occupy the caregiver role by default. According to the report released in March by US Healthcare Workforce, 87 percent of nurses are women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 80 percent of healthcare workers are women. We are the hospice nurses, the physician assistants, the physical therapists. The ones tending to the young, the old, the fading, the forgotten. And in the 1600s, this was even more pronounced. Before physicians, there were women who gathered herbs, mixed tinctures, whispered prayers, held hands, and ushered people into life and into death and sometimes back again.

To lead, sometimes that caregiving must be set aside. And that choice weighs heavy on nurturers.

Then there is modernity:

How does being a mother affect leadership?

How does being a wife?

How does being the one expected to build the home, nurture the family, care for the elders and in-laws?

I remember climbing the corporate ladder and watching women I admired—women who mentored me—delay motherhood until the last biologically viable second. One of my favorite bosses, a brilliant Irish PhD in physics, once had suits tailored specifically to hide her pregnancy. Because at that time, maternity leave and career advancement could not coexist in the same equation.

This is the landscape women navigate. A landscape Jacquotte would have known in a different form, in a different century—but it’s still hauntingly familiar.

My friend, though, wanted to talk about the dedication.

For the women who do right.

For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.

Because in leadership, there is always a moment—a crossroads—when doing the right thing may mean becoming complicit in something that isn’t right. Sometimes survival demands choices you would never make in a perfect world.

We see the consequences of hubris and hard choices in our real world today. Not to get too political, but right now there is a crisis in the Caribbean that breaks my heart. U.S. forces have fired on fishing vessels, claiming they carried drugs. But no proof has been given. Witness accounts suggest at least one boat was attacked without cause, leaving two people clinging for life. It seems a second strike was orders to kill defenseless victims.

If drugs were aboard, they now sit at the bottom of the sea—destroyed by the same guns that struck the fishermen. This needless killing violates the Geneva Convention, the rules of war and basic humanity.

And now investigations must happen to see how leadership failed and who was complicit in illegal orders. It is a horrible situation when the people in all levels of the chain of command fail. It’s horrid, that those below followed orders that were illegal. Leadership—good or bad—always has accomplices.

And that is part of the burden.

In Fire Sword and Sea, Jacquotte and her crew face their own moral storms. In the 1600s, the “currency” of the seas was not just gold or silver. It was people. African people. A horrid truth I confronted in my research was located in merchant records.

I saw 17 guinea for a pewter bowl.

At first, I thought they meant the coin minted for King Charles II with gold from the country Guinea. But the coin of popularity in the Caribbean. The Spanish silver pieces of eight were. It was upon further digging that these records were referring to people. Everyone from Africa are commonly called Guinea in the 1600s.

So a pewter vessel was valued at seventeen Guinea. Seventeen human lives.

Imagine a world where a pewter bowl was worth more than a child.

So yes—Fire Sword and Sea has action and saga and mystery. But beneath the adventure, it wrestles with leadership, complicity, survival, and the cost of chasing freedom in a world built on stolen bodies.

This book asks questions:

What does it take to lead?

What is the price of doing the right thing?

What happens when you must choose between your principles and your people?

And how do women—across eras—navigate these impossible intersections of duty, ambition, and care?

I cannot wait to have deeper conversations with you about these choices and about leadership.

And so I return to Fire Sword and Sea’s dedication:

For the women who do right.

For the women who do wrong for the right reasons.

For the women who burn it all down, find beauty in ashes.

For the dreamers left behind—keep sailing.”

Books to get us diving deeper into leadership are:

The Soul of a Woman — Isabel Allende

A reflective nonfiction exploration of feminism, aging, ambition, and the fight for autonomy across a lifetime.

Take Care of Them Like My Own — Dr. Ala Stanford: A powerful memoir of a Black woman surgeon who turned grief, racism, and systemic neglect into a movement that vaccinated and cared for thousands during COVID‑19. Soror Ala is running for congress to lead the 3rd congressional district of Philadelphia.

The Broken Earth Trilogy — N.K. Jemisin

A brilliant speculative saga about oppressed women who wield world-shaking power, exploring trauma, leadership, survival, and righteous destruction.

I, Medusa — Ayana Gray

A bold, haunting retelling that gives Medusa her voice back, revealing the girl behind the myth and exploring power, wrath, injustice, and the cost of becoming the monster the world insists you are.

Birth of a Dynasty — Chinaza Bado (AKA JJ Mcavoy)

A sweeping tale of ambition, generational power, and the women who shape empires from the shadows, exploring the sacrifices, strategies, and emotional costs of building—and defending—a legacy.

We are six weeks away from the release of course Fire Sword and Sea on January 13th, 2026. Caribbean women pirates—Black women pirates join French and Indigenous women to sail the seas. Review this novel in Edelweiss and NetGalley. Vote for it on Goodreads. Help me get folks talking about this novel.

This week, I’m highlighting Baldwin and Company through their website and Bookshop.org .

Consider purchasing Fire Sword and Sea from Baldwin and Company or one of my partners in the fight, bookstore’s large and small who are in this with me.

Come on my readers. Let’s get everyone excited for truth.

Show notes include a list of the books mentioned in this broadcast.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com under the podcast link in the About tab.

Don’t let this be a one-time thing—like, share, and subscribe to join the growing family at Write of Passage. Welcome aboard this ship. I heart you.

Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-12-02 14:10:00.

For me, the most hectic—and refreshing—moment is when one book is finished and turned in. My mind doesn’t like to be idle, so I find things to do. I read. I explore. I bake. And eventually, I reach that moment when my brain says, “The heck with this. Let’s write. The question becomes, what do I write.”

Finding the Idea You Have to Write

Getting started is one of the hardest things a writer has to do.

Where do you begin when you want to write the next great American novel? My first piece of advice is simple: take your expectations down.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream big. Dream as big as you want. But no great novel can come from you if you aren’t committed to writing the novel in the first place.

Writing is one of those endeavors where best intentions, wishes, and all the things you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve written don’t count for much. At some point, you have to show up and put words on paper. That’s how you win the game—or, more accurately, how you put yourself in the game.

Before there are chapters, however, there is an idea.

And an idea doesn’t have to arrive fully formed.

Where Story Ideas Come From

For me, book ideas tend to come in three ways: a person, a circumstance, or a fascination that won’t let me go.

Because I write historical fiction, I may happen upon an unusual fact or discover a person in history who immediately piques my interest. Something about that person catches hold of me, and I need to know more.

That happened with Queen of Exiles. While researching and writing Sister Mother Warrior, I encountered the story of Marie-Louise Coidavid Christophe, wife of Henri Christophe. Christophe rose as a soldier in the Haitian Revolution to the liberator Dessalines’s right hand man and then became the king of Haiti, which made Marie-Louise its queen. But what fascinated me was how this simple hotelier’s daughter grew to handle herself on the world stage through building a kingdom in Haiti, then in exile arriving to Europe.

I wanted to know her.

Who was this woman? What happened to her? What did she experience? How did someone live through such extraordinary transformations?

That curiosity became a story.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t a person. It’s a circumstance.

My Lady Worthing Mysteries grew partly from my fascination with the complicated political and social world surrounding abolition, race, class, and freedom in Regency England. But another piece came from something much more personal: watching Murder, She Wrote with my mother. Those seemingly unrelated things could live together in my imagination—an amateur sleuth stumbling across murders and a historical world filled with political intrigue—catnip.

Thus a circumstance became a playground for story.

And sometimes an idea begins with nothing more complicated than something you can’t stop thinking about.

A question. An image. An experience. Something strange you read. Something that happened to you. Something you wish had happened. Something that makes you angry, delighted, curious, or confused.

Pay attention to the thoughts that keep coming back.

They may be trying to tell you something.

The StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment: Start With the Bubble

This is why I created the StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment process. That’s a lot of fancy words for the way. Vanessa’s brain works and how she teaches story craft.

As an engineer, I love spreadsheets and forms. But I love love, magical forms that help build to something. So I built a bubble form where I throw ideas into them, play with those ideas, question them, and gradually refine them until I find the story I know I have to tell.

At the beginning, I don’t want perfection. I want possibility.

The Idea Bubble is deliberately simple. Give yourself ten minutes and fill the bubbles. One way to get moving is to use a basic story pattern:

Subject + Verb + Object + Conflict

A girl wants to become an astronaut, but she’s afraid of heights.

Is that your novel? Maybe. Maybe not.

That’s not the point.

The point is that you’ve made something where nothing existed before.

Fill another bubble. And another.

Don’t edit yourself, not yet. Don’t decide whether an idea is literary enough, commercial enough, original enough, or important enough. Generate first. Assessment comes later.

Then take the ideas that create a spark and begin asking questions.

What is the situation or circumstance?

What fascinates me about it?

What question keeps returning?

What connection do I have to this idea—something I’ve lived, witnessed, inherited, studied, or wondered about?

Now we’re moving from having an idea to discovering whether there might be a story inside it.

Give Yourself Permission to Want What You Want

The next question is one writers sometimes don’t want to answer:

Why do I want to write this?

Maybe you’ve never heard of this subject before and you’re fascinated.

Maybe you want to explore something you don’t understand.

Maybe there’s something you want to say that might encourage another person.

Maybe this is personal.

Maybe you simply want to write.

Or let’s get mercenary: maybe you think the idea will sell.

That’s allowed, too.

None of these motivations is inherently wrong.

Some writing may be primarily for you. Some may be intended for a particular community of readers. Some may be a gift you want to put into the world. Some may be unabashedly commercial. Some may begin as one of these and become another.

I’m Vanessa Riley, and I’m giving you permission to write about anything you absolutely want.

You don’t know how far an idea will reach when you’re standing at the beginning.

And there are no stupid ideas.

There are no trivial ideas.

If you look at an idea and think, That’s stupid, my response is that you may simply not have developed it enough yet.

Question it before you discard it.

Turn it around. Make it more specific. Find the conflict. Change the circumstances. Ask what fascinates you about it. Ask why it keeps coming back.

The important thing at this stage is clarity—not justification.

What Kind of Story Might This Be

Once an idea survives that first examination, I start asking another question:

What kind of story could this become?

Literary Fiction? Historical Fiction? Romance? Love Story? Mystery? Thriller? Horror? Commercial Fiction? Memoir? Biographical Fiction? Science Fiction? Space Opera? Fantasy? Saga? Women’s Fiction?

Or maybe your answer is:

I don’t know yet.

That’s a perfectly legitimate answer.

You’re still in a nebulous phase. You aren’t signing a contract with a genre. You’re forming a hypothesis.

But having some idea of where you’re going can begin to tell you what you need to learn.

Genre starts shaping your research. It gives you craft questions. It helps you identify the books you should be reading. It begins to reveal what kind of experience a future reader might expect.

So choose a direction without treating it as a permanent label.

Then test it.

Genre Is Also a Promise

This is where the I shift from What do I want to write? to What experience am I preparing to give a reader?

Genre creates expectations.

A reader who picks up a Mystery has expectations that differ from someone choosing a Romance. A reader selecting Horror is looking for a different emotional experience from a reader choosing Women’s Fiction. Those genres may overlap. Writers may bend conventions. Books may be hybrids.

But readers still bring expectations with them.

That isn’t a limitation. It’s information.

Think about pacing. Character. Conflict. Worldbuilding. Emotional experience. Plot and structure. Ending and resolution. Tone. And of course Genre conventions.

What does a reader who loves this kind of story anticipate in each of those areas?

The fun of writing is knowing the rules and carefully breaking them. You never blindly obey every convention, but you should fulfill expectations, maybe bend them, combine them, delay them, and sometimes give the unexpected.

But you should know the rules and expectations.

Find Your Story Neighbors

The next question I ask is:

What stories live near my story?

I call these Story Neighbors.

A good writer is a reader.

Think about the books you love and the books that resemble some aspect of the story you’re considering. A Story Neighbor doesn’t have to contain your exact plot. It may share your genre, audience, premise, setting, character type, emotional experience, tone, structure, or reader promise.

Then go back and read those books like a writer.

Don’t merely ask whether you’re enjoying them.

Study them. I had a lovely conversation with an author yesterday about the lineal movements within Fire Sword and Sea. Those in between times of the twilight acts really stuck with her and she wanted to know why I chose those moments to open Jacquotte Delahaye’s journey.

That’s inside baseball talk for writers. You should be looking at how quickly the story moves? How are the characters introduced and developed? What creates conflict? How much worldbuilding does the author provide? What emotional experience does the book deliver? How is the plot structured? What happens at the ending? What’s the tone? Which genre conventions appear again and again?

Most importantly:

What might a reader of that book expect when they pick up mine?

You’re learning the neighborhood before you build your house.

An Idea Doesn’t Have to Become a Book

Shocking but true. This may be the most freeing part of the entire process.

After you’ve bubbled and questioned and researched and read and considered genre and reader expectations, you’re allowed to decide:

Not this one. Not now.

My process isn’t designed to force every idea into becoming a novel.

It’s designed to help to help me write that next important book. That means a lot of ideas go into a file cabinet or a waste can.

Sometimes when I go through this process ideas bubble to the top and I have enough direction to begin the story.

Sometimes I need more research before I decide a bubble’s fate.

Sometime the bubble pops under its own weight. Because there’s just not enough there.

All of this deciding is part of the progress.

Never give up too quickly, but don’t waste time on an idea that’s going no where or is not the right time.

Remember the next great American novel doesn’t begin as the next great American novel.

It begins with somebody showing up.

It begins with curiosity.

It begins with a bubble.

It begins with words on a page.

That’s how you put yourself in the game.

I’ve just walked you through my STORYMETRIC™ Story Starter / idea assessment process. Because you guys are my audience, I’m giving you a link to download the free PDF for this concept. It’s a fillable PDF. It’s printable and it will help you decide on what’s your next great American novel will be.

Through this last quarter of 2026, I’m going to be teaching, so buckle up, subscribe, stay tuned, and let’s write together.

This week’s books include:

Romance — Last First Kiss by Julian Winters: An event planner is forced back into the orbit of Jamie, the person who broke his heart, giving the two a second chance at both love and self-discovery while planning a high-profile wedding.

Horror — Mazywood by Tananarive Due: Decades after a celebrated Black actress’s death, her filmmaker grandson visits her secluded California home and confronts the monstrous legacy of the choices she made to survive old Hollywood.

Women’s/Commercial Fiction — The Me I Used to Be by Kristan Higgins: Twenty-five years after a tragedy shattered their friendship, four former best friends reunite for their high school reunion and confront the secrets, regrets, and unexpected lives that have shaped who they’ve become.

Historical Fiction — Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley: In the seventeenth-century Caribbean, Jacquotte Delahaye defies the limits placed on women to become a pirate captain and ultimately turns from the pursuit of riches toward a fight for freedom and liberation.

And Loyalty Books is my Indie of the week. Check them out for these and my books.

You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.

Hey. Let’s keep rising and creating together. I need you. That’s the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.

Thank you for being here.

I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

It’s universally known that everyone who has a career or talent that intersects with the public must learn to deal with waiting. Everyone waits. Whether a king or a servant, a politician or a bank teller, time slows down while you wait to receive or give something. Even though the physical globe continues to rotate around the sun, our present circle will seem stopped or stuck. It’s an uneasy feeling that grows and can become unbearable the longer the wait time.

Creatives, especially writers know at some point in their career, will have to wait. Let’s dive into this world. Early on, it’s waiting for the right idea. Then, it’s waiting to find time to write. After that, we wait on edits or feedback from workshops, peers, or critique groups. If you are pursuing a traditional path, we wait for the magic call or Zoom with an agent announcing they love our voice and wish to sign us. Then, there’s the ultimate wait when, as a traditional author, one anguishes for a positive response from an editor at a publishing house. We want that “yes.” We crave that affirmation that we’ve written something that matters.

For indie authors, the struggles may look different, but waiting is still inevitable. You might be waiting on cover designers, layout artists, or formatters to deliver essential elements for book production. But no matter how we publish, all authors wait for early reviews and to see how fans and new readers react.

I’m reminded of a keynote I once heard Walter Mosley give. He was joking with his close friend, Gregory Hines, about how his world would change now that he had received his long-awaited “yes”. His risks were finally paying off, both literally and figuratively. But Hines, in his wisdom, simply told him, “Don’t worry, you’ll be broke again.” Mosley acknowledged that Hines was right and drew a big laugh from the National Book Club conference admitting that he was again and again.

Vanessa meets Walter Mosley at the 2024 National Bookclub Conference in Atlanta.

As authors, we will always be in a waiting game until we stop writing. We will be waiting on contracts, ad placements, book launches, or even the next words to come. But waiting doesn’t mean sitting around, worrying while we stave off dread. Waiting should be active.

Waiting involves an expectation that things will work together for our good (Romans 8:28). We must prepare for the next step (James 5:7). I want to act as if the answer is yes. I work in the present to be ready for the blessings. I never expect the worst. I try to be joyful until I have a reason to cry.

And let’s be real. Sometimes, the answer is no. Sometimes, it’s a kick in the gut—the realization that this good thing was not for you. It’s okay to grieve. We are human. We can be sad.

Yet, when we feel like we’ve blown it, we must remember that we are seen. We are not forgotten. I love how Psalmist puts it in Psalms 40:1-3:

“I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise.”

So rejoice in the good. Weep in the sadness. And know we are not alone.

The Waiting Winners Timeline.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a list of some of the great waits that eventually paid off. History is full of people who had to wait long periods for their dreams and recognition to come true:

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) – The “Godmother of Rock and Roll” influenced Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley but wasn’t fully acknowledged until her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

• Cicely Tyson (1924–2021) – Though she acted for decades and delivered groundbreaking performances in Sounder (1972) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), she never received her full due until 2018 when forty-six years later, Cicely was presented with an honorary Oscar for her lifetime achievements. She was in her 90s.• Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) – As I mentioned in earlier episodes, Ride or Die or Get Out of the Way and Grab Somerset Gumbo, Your Best Girl, and Go, Zora’s work during the Harlem Renaissance was intentionally buried by gatekeepers. She died in poverty and obscurity, and her work had to be rediscovered a full decade after her death. I will say this a thousand times: This is not the way. Death and poverty should never be requirements for a writer’s success.• Octavia Butler (1947–2006) – Octavia’s first published work was a short story called Crossover in 1971. Her first novel, published by Doubleday in 1976, was just the beginning. The visionary science fiction writer, who won Hugo (1984) and Nebula Awards (1985), struggled for mainstream success until she published Parable of the Sower in 1993 and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. That’s more than 22 years of waiting. The world is forever grateful for Octavia’s perseverance

• Walter Mosley – Walter started writing in the 1980s, and his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was published by WW Norton on June 19, 1990. He faced several years of difficulty in getting published because publishers didn’t think there was an audience for Black detective fiction. Once it sold, it became a classic, even being adapted into a movie starring Denzel Washington.

One could say it all paid off. Perhaps. But I’m sure that the waiting wasn’t easy or sweet. I am thankful that each persevered with their gifts and changed the world.

How to Productively Wait

Since waiting is inevitable, I made a list of practical ways to stay productive and engaged:

1. Don’t Obsess—Rest: Avoid refreshing your inbox constantly. Do chores. Volunteer. Don’t obsess on reels or social media, but do find ways to bless someone else.

2. Read Widely: Explore new releases, classics, nonfiction, and poetry to inspire new ideas. This is something I do. It’s one of the reasons I confidently write in three genres—historical fiction, romance, and mystery. My voice adapts. I give readers of these genres what they want, what they expect, because I learn from all good stories. Sister Mother Warrior, about the two women who shaped the Haitian Revolution, is my most literary work, but it’s also the most muscular novel I’ve published. Its heft comes from a lot of nonfiction, including books on war and diaspora poetry.

3. Take a Class: Study writing guides or attend workshops. Some great books to consider:

o Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley – Explores storytelling fundamentals such as character development, plot, and voice.

o How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill edited by Jericho Brown – Features Nikki Giovanni, David Omotoso Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, Angela Flournoy, and more.

o On Writing by Stephen King, a personal favorite

4. Build Your Author Platform: Update your website, refresh your bio, and check your events list. I know some of those dates have passed.

5. Network with Other Writers: Attend writing groups, conferences, and in-person events.

6. Touch Grass—Literally: Get outside, take a walk, observe nature, and breathe fresh air

7. Enter Writing Contests: Consider submitting to:

o Writers of the Future Contest

o The Bridport Prize (That’s a UK contest)

o The Black List Unpublished Novel Award

o Reedsy.com has lists of competitions for poetry and proses.

Writers realize that all competitions are not created equal. Some have implicit bias. Do your homework before submitting. I don’t want your work stolen or misrepresented or fumbled by hands that should never had touched your creation in the first place

8. Stay Informed on Industry Trends: Keep up with publishing news, avoid scams, and research new agents and publishers and marketplaces.

9. Plan Your Marketing Strategy: Work on your launch plan and outreach to bloggers and media, so you are ready when you get your yes.

10. Replenish Creativity: Step away when needed—travel, pick up a hobby, or simply rest.

11. (Bonus Point) Start a New Project: If you’re querying, don’t immediately start book two in your series. Instead, write something fresh that could be your breakthrough project.

Embrace the Wait

Waiting is hard, but it doesn’t have to be unproductive or soul-crushing. It’s part of our process. It’s formative to our seasons of growth. We have to be prepared, or we will not harvest and allow our fruit to rot. Remember, everything worthwhile takes time. Every success story has had its pauses. The key to getting through to the light is to fill the waiting with purpose. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just getting into the business (the publishing game), trust that waiting always comes before your journey unfolds.

Keep writing.Keep learning.Keep going.And when that long-awaited “yes” finally comes, enjoy it. Bask in the joy. And remember how it feels, because, as Brother Mosley indicated, you will go through it again.

The lists of books mentioned in the podcast are listed below. Included links support Loyalty Bookstore via Bookshop.org:

Butler, Octavia E. Crossover: Short Story: Fragments. Edited by Robin Scott Wilson, Clarion, June 1971, Signet / New American Library. OEB 337, ca. 1970.

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Seven Stories Press, 1993.

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Mosley, Walter. Elements of Fiction. Hachette Books, 2009.

Brown, Jericho, editor. How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill. HarperOne, 2021.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000.

Riley, Sister Mother Warrior, William Morrow, 2022.

Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-02-11 14:10:00.

The gift of hospitality shouldn’t be dead. But if I’m honest, I think in certain parts of the country, and in certain circles I’ve moved through, it might be on life-support. I’ve watched people forget how to say welcome to strangers.

I’ve seen other seem oblivious to making room at the table for others. This weekend while I was at Barnes and Nobles, I was handed an orange whistle and given instructions on how to blow it if I see an abduction happening. Because elections have consequences, brown people are not being treated with hospitality. They are literally under assault for being brown.

I want off this Ferris wheel of bad karma. I want humans to act with generosity instead of suspicion. I want the world I write about, the happy ever after, the place where victory comes for those who persevere.

You see, I am my mother’s daughter.I was raised in the gospel of killing them with kindness—and if you’re still hatefully breathing, I might go in for another round. If you’ve read any of my Lady Worthing mysteries, you know I believe in Columbo-type persistent. And in Jessica Fletcher style, I will stack a body count and keep digging until I find the truth. Determination is my love language. Stubbornness is too.

So when I run head-first into metaphorical walls—and Lord, have I met a few this year—it isn’t easy to step back and consider quitting.

While it’s natural for me to reflect on what I “might’ve, should’ve, could’ve” done differently, that level of introspection doesn’t just come with right and wrong. It adds farces and facts. Am I supposed to say the truth in a softer voice? Am I to ignore facts and write euphemisms like we don’t know that colonizers like Columbus came to kill and steal?

I suppose it would be easier to forget that pirates in the 1600s were Black women, that ships didn’t have an integrated crew, all while sailing with a cargo hold of chattel slaves.

Ooops. A company with a $65 Billion dollar market cap instructed me to say a cargo hold of chattel imprisonment.

Le Sigh.

And then we arrive at my favorite time of year: Thanksgiving, the holiday my mother owned. She held it close to her heart like the pride of a champion athlete. Forget the World Series or the Boston Marathon—Thanksgiving was her event. She trained for it all year. She curated pumpkin ornaments and gleaming charger plates in reds and deep oranges. She laid out gravy boats and soup tureens like treasured relics. And I fought—fiercely—to inherit the Fitz and Floyd pig that keeps the yeast rolls warm. Not just because it’s pretty, but because it symbolizes everything, she taught me: family gathering, long hours in the kitchen, bending over backward to make others feel warm and welcomed and in life pigs are allowed to be pretty.

Hospitality was one of my mother’s greatest legacies.I hope—truly hope—that I embody even a portion of that in my life and work. But I won’t lie: this year it has been hard.

Hard to be hospitable.

Hard to turn the other cheek when the other side of the equation seems intent on destruction.

Hard to smile when some would prefer you feel small, insignificant, or silenced.

Hard to create when your work is dismissed as nothing or there have been too many Caribbean books.

On social media, I may laugh and joke. I may sing polite praises of my enemies—and those who I no longer esteem as highly as I once did. There are exceptions, of course. And y’all know exactly who they are—65 Billion dollar company. But I digress.

In a few days, it will be Thanksgiving.And I am giving thanks.

I am thankful for my family.I am thankful for my friends.I am thankful for my colleagues—past and present.And I am deeply thankful for you, my listeners and my readers.

Without you, I wouldn’t have the hope I carry for the coming year.Without you, there would be no Write of Passage or stories reaching new tables.

No late-night messages about characters who’ve haunted me until I shared their story.

No shared laughter over inside jokes you’ve begun to catch—because you know me. And I love getting to know you.

Thank you for the letters, the comments.Thank you for the likes, the shares, and every conversation you sparked.Thank you for recommending this podcast, or my latest books Fire Sword and Sea, or old favorites like Island Queen or A Duke, the Lady, and A Baby. Your hospitality—your generosity—has lifted the low moments and made the high ones shine even brighter.

So as we gather around our Thanksgiving tables, I want you to know that I’m grateful for you. I’m hopeful for the new year—hopeful for the clearing away of old spaces, the opening of new ones. I am happy about the tables I sit at and the ones I walk away from with peace.

I am thankful for the power to know who I am.And the courage to become who I want to be.

I write about characters who make that choice every day—who decide, despite their flaws and wounds and circumstances, to grow into the person they long to become. My wish for you, for everyone within the sound of my voice, and for every reader who picks up one of my books is simple:

May you live your greatest adventure.May you become who you were always meant to be.And may that parent, that person who loved you so deeply—whether sitting across the Thanksgiving table or watching from above—look at you and see their brightest legacy shining.

This week’s books to reflect upon are:

Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara A powerful, modern meditation on the radical generosity that transforms people.

The Kindness Diaries: One Man’s Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World by Leon Logothetis Inspiring real-life story of a man traveling the world relying solely on the kindness of strangers.

Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes by Maya Angelou — A collection of essays + recipes that really celebrate food, memory, and welcome.

For a taste of fiction, food and healing, check out Bitter and Sweet by Christy Award winner Rhonda McKnight.

I can’t believe we are less than seven weeks away from the release of course Fire Sword and Sea on January 13th, 2026. Caribbean women pirates—Black women pirates join French and Indigenous women to sail the seas. If you’re a librarian, vote for this book now in Library Reads in Edelweiss and NetGalley. Indie Next is voting now too. Time is almost up.

This week, I’m highlighting Fox Tale Book Store through their website and Bookshop.org .

Consider purchasing Fire Sword and Sea from FoxTale or one of my partners in the fight, bookstore’s large and small who are in this with me.

Come on my readers. Let’s get everyone excited for truth.

Show notes include a list of the books mentioned in this broadcast.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com under the podcast link in the About tab.

If you’re on board, press that like button, subscribe, and share Write of Passage. Never miss a moment. We have work to do. And I need You.

Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-11-25 14:10:00.

Three names: Crystal Mason. E.L.A. Chanel Miller.

Their stories are different, but each bore the brunt of injustice while others—the folks society deemed worthy of protecting—well, their futures were too promising to ruin. So they were given grace.

Until the outcry became too loud to ignore.

How loud can you scream?

Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?

The last seven days have had my mind spinning.

On September 24, Crystal Mason was finally able to breathe.

You see, in 2018, Mason was convicted of illegal voting in Texas and sentenced to five years in prison after she cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election. At the time, she was still on federal supervised release for an earlier tax-fraud conviction, and she did not know being on supervised release made her ineligible to vote.

Her provisional ballot was never counted, but the law came for her anyway.

Think about that for a moment. A ballot that never counted. A woman who said she did not know she was ineligible. Well, that situation gave her a five-year prison sentence.

After years of appeals, in March 2024, the Texas Second Court of Appeals reversed Mason’s conviction and entered a judgment of acquittal. The court found the evidence insufficient to prove that she actually knew she was ineligible to vote.

But prosecutors didn’t want to take the L. They continued to try to revive the conviction.

But in the last seven days, on September 24, 2026, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the state’s highest criminal court—rejected these efforts and left Mason’s acquittal in place.

Eight years after her conviction for casting a ballot, she’s finally free of the charges. I guess justice delayed is better than denied, right?

Then on September 25, another court confronted the disturbing use of government power. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher found the federal government in contempt after immigration authorities deported a young asylum seeker identified as E.L.A. to El Salvador despite court orders to protect him here.

E.L.A., the young minor identified in the papers, had come to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at sixteen. The government wrongly deported him, acknowledged the error and facilitated his return to the United States. Then it deported him again.

Judge Gallagher has now ordered the government to facilitate his return. One wonders what will happen, to a teen imigrant who came here seeking a better life.

So, you’re asking yourself, Vanessa, what do these two events mean?

At first glance, perhaps nothing more than two court rulings happening within twenty-four hours of each other.

But I can’t unsee who gets swept into the mashing jaws of American justice—and gets grace.

Crystal Mason is a Black woman who casts a provisional ballot and was given a 5-year sentence.

E.L.A. is an immigrant: a young Salvadoran asylum seeker who came to this country for asylum, and despite court orders, was deported. Twice.

The woman—the Black woman, and the immigrant get the harshest penalties.

Which brings me to Cornell.

On September 28, a criminal investigation was reopened into allegations involving a former Cornell University student and members of Cornell’s student Greek fraternity, Chi Phi.

Jane Doe has been trying to get justice since October 2024, because no one wanted to purse her case beyond school discipline.

In a civil lawsuit filed this month, Doe alleges that she’d been drinking, went to the Chi Phi fraternity house, was pressured to take what she was told was ketamine, became increasingly impaired, and was sexually assaulted by multiple men over a period of hours.

These are allegations. The men have not been convicted of these alleged assaults, and the reopened criminal investigation will have to determine what the evidence establishes.

One particularly disturbing part of the complaint involves an alleged Snapchat group conversation among fraternity members. According to the lawsuit, messages alerted fraternity members that a woman was upstairs and available for sex. Doe alleges that additional men subsequently entered the room and that assaults continued for hours.

She reported the incident to Cornell University Police. Cornell conducted its own disciplinary investigation. The university says the resulting sanctions included suspensions and expulsions, and Cornell permanently removed the Chi Phi chapter from campus.

But criminal charges did not follow.

Then, on September 14, 2026, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell, Chi Phi, seven former fraternity members and others, alleging negligence, sexual assault, sexual battery, breach of contract and other violations of New York law.

So today, two weeks later, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that he was reopening the criminal investigation and present evidence to a grand jury.

And I couldn’t help thinking: Haven’t we been here before?

White young man or men, sexual assault, no punishment. Yes, we have, with the case of Chanel Miller.

In 2015, nineteen-year-old Stanford freshman and competitive swimmer Brock Turner sexually assaulted Miller, then twenty-two, after a fraternity party.

Miller was unconscious. Turner was caught assaulting her behind a dumpster. Two heroes intervened. A jury heard the evidence, and in March 2016, Turner was convicted of three felony sexual-assault offenses.

Prosecutors sought six years in prison, but Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in county jail, three years of probation, and sex-offender registration. Turner ultimately served about three months.

At sentencing, Judge Persky explicitly considered the consequences imprisonment would have for the convicted felon Brock Turner:

“Obviously, a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.”

His life mattered more. The judge worried about Turner’s education, his future, and reputation, something Turner forgot about when he committed sexual assault behind a dumpster.

And what about her life?

What about the woman who woke up in a hospital and had to piece together what had happened to her?

What about the future she thought she’d have? And how this cruel act will constantly remind her of the lack of care a perpetrator and a judge had for her?

In America, whose mistake becomes criminality?

I ask that question, but it’s kind of obvious. White males from good families, going to a good school, get great grace.

Their futures are considered, not the immigrant E.L.A. facing death in El Salvador.

I don’t know what a grand jury will ultimately conclude about the allegations at Cornell. An indictment has to be handed down, then a trial will sort through facts. And of course, all that can happen is that a judge like Persky could rule for a light or non-existent punishment.

Taken together, these stories force me to see the specter of American justice. The ghosts of the past still determine who gets the book thrown at them—and whose promising future makes the world hesitate before picking up the book or throwing stones.

Maybe privilege doesn’t guarantee protection, but it definitely softens the arc of justice.

And as I look at this week, I can see how race, immigration status, money, education, and institutional prestige still determine every outcome.

No one is guaranteed to come save us from ourselves.

And too many of us don’t recognize that something is fully wrong until we find ourselves in the crosshairs of those very circumstances.

I’ve talked before about being our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

But right now, I also need you to focus on you.

It’s Time for Your Story

We are surrounded by messages every day telling us that we’re not important. That our experiences don’t matter. That our voices don’t matter.

I’m here to tell you the opposite.

You matter.

Your voice matters.

And your story matters more than ever.

Now is the time to write your words down before someone else writes their limited vision of them.

Tell your story. They’re banning more books and someday someone will decide yours—woman, immigrant, minority, etc. isn’t worth hearing. Bret Stephens wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times published Sept 22, (same week) accusing the National Book Award as being DEI—checks notes—for not choosing enough straight white male authors on the list.

Write it before the airways become clogged with people trying to define who you are, what your experience means, and why you shouldn’t be remembered.

Starting in October and throughout this final quarter of the year, I’m dedicating myself to teaching.

I have several teaching events lined up, and I’m excited about them. But I’m going to use this platform to teach writing—to share techniques I’ve learned and mastered and methods that have allowed me to tell the stories I needed to tell.

Because we need all our stories out there.

We are living through a profound deficit of empathy while too many people are drowning in a deficit of hope.

I believe books open doorways.

I believe poems carry us through misery to soar in triumph.

I believe stories allow one human to inhabit another’s world long enough to recognize their humanity.

I believe in you.

So we will not surrender to the drumbeat of despair.

I don’t care whether the toll comes from a government bell, a judge, a politician, an institution, a rejection letter, or simply life’s circumstances.

You are somebody.

Your story belongs here.

And I’m committed to helping you tell it, just as so many of you have helped me continue telling mine.

So buckle up.

We’re going for a ride.

This is our learning quarter.

This is our writing quarter.

Get your journals together. Sharpen your pencils. Charge your laptops. And if you haven’t subscribed, subscribe and come along.

We’re going to write.

For my paid subscribers, I’ll have worksheets and exercises to help you do the work.

Heck, I’m probably going to give a few away.

That’s how committed I am to this.

Because I want us all writing.

I want us remembering.

And documenting.

And shouting our own stories.

These last seven days have reminded me of the importance of words and writing and fear.

We may not always have our say in a courtroom. We may not be afforded the benefit of innocence or the belief that our government will follow the laws.

But we cannot stop protesting. We cannot stop being a witness to history. We cannot let evil win by disappearing from the record.

This week’s book list is some of my favorite craft books.

Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress — A practical fiction-writing guide to constructing compelling openings, sustaining conflict and momentum through the difficult middle, and delivering endings that fulfill the story’s original promise to the reader.

* How Fiction Works by Oakley Hall — A craft guide that uses extensive examples from literature to teach the mechanics of fiction, including plot, characterization, point of view, dialogue, word choice, voice, and style.

* The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman — A business-focused guide to earning a living as a freelance commercial writer, covering how to find clients, market your services, set rates, build a business, and turn writing into a financially sustainable career.

* Your First Novel by Ann Rittenberg & Laura Whitcomb — A combined craft-and-publishing guide that takes first-time novelists from developing and structuring a manuscript through characters and revision to approaching agents and navigating publication.

* On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels — A comprehensive guide to romance writing that covers the genre and its subgenres, creating convincing romantic leads, building relationship conflict and sexual tension, crafting the HEA, and preparing a manuscript for submission.

* The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing edited by Meg Leder & Jack Heffron — A wide-ranging collection of instruction and advice from novelists and publishing professionals covering story development, character, craft, writer’s block, revision, agents, publishing, and selling a novel.

This week’s bookseller is Black Pearl Bookstore.

And Black Pearl might have a few signed copies of Fire Sword and Sea and can order Murder in St. James’s Park.

You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.

Hey. Let’s keep rising and creating and writing together. I need you. That is the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.

Thank you for being here.

I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

There is nothing worse than looking into your child’s eyes and realizing they’ve been struggling—and somehow, you missed it. I know that look. And years later, I still carry the guilt.

I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s devastating piece in The New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

That part—

I could feel her daughter looking at her. “Did you know…when you decided to put me here?”

The question hit me straight in the heart and took me back a number of years to my own guilt bomb.

Flashback: 2023

My dearest darling daughter was in her senior year of high school, and she was flailing.

I can remember her soft brown eyes glancing up at me, filled with despair, like she had just realized her mother was human and not a superhero. In those small irises were water droplets and the look of failure.

Seeing that in your child’s eyes is worse than a nightmare.

My daughter had been homeschooled from the very beginning, and I can still remember clicking through the web searching for school programs, drilling through curricula—from IXL to Abeka—constructing strengths-and-weaknesses charts, researching resources, all nine yards, trying to choose a program that aligned with our family values and had the flexibility to accommodate an active-duty military man and a scientist-type, consulting, writer mom.

Homeschooling fit the demands and worked until about third grade, when I realized Georgia’s limited homeschooling oversight could allow my child to miss key testing and other things. We decided to switch her to public school.

We lucked out and found a hybrid county public school, Connections Academy. They had everything—or at least promise of everything. High praise from teachers and students, a solid curriculum, and the majority of the classes would still be taught in an online atmosphere . My daughter could continue to be at home or travel with me while attending school.

I believed deeply in flexible, in-depth education. I still do. I believe in investing in my child’s education, so when there were weaknesses and I couldn’t help, I found tutors, sought out additional summer programs like Kumon, and did whatever was required to make sure my baby learned and enjoyed learning.

From third through eleventh grade, my daughter got A’s and B’s.

I thought she was fine.

She wasn’t.

In her senior year, my daughter cracked under the pressure. She had a pile of unfinished assignments, grades dipping toward D’s and F’s because of incompletes, and she started talking about not wanting to go to college. Then she admitted she had trouble reading and keeping up and that, when stressed, numbers floated.

I was in shock.

I reached out to the school for help. It took a while for the emails to return from the void, but there was no real help. Mandated county testing for this type of situation wasn’t a priority for them. Perhaps they, too, were shocked that an A-B student could have such problems. It soon became obvious that this excellent school didn’t have the resources or desire to be part of the solution.

My husband and I had to save her on our own.

We worked with our doctors to get her diagnosed.

I was stunned by the diagnosis. My daughter had a learning disability that had gone undiagnosed for years.

I’m not going to get too deeply into her private medical information. But some of its characteristics look like ADHD. It definitely bears anxious fruit, and it can affect her ability to perform certain mathematical processes. She required accommodations and a learning plan. Hubby and I had to implement them to get my daughter back to wanting to learn.

Back to the Present

I read Hannah-Jones’s piece, and my heart broke for her and her daughter.

A mother’s guilt knows no end.

Something inside crumbles, ripping at our insides, when our child is in agony—or worse, when they look up with failure written in their eyes and they see it written in ours.

How did we let this happen?

These kids are right to put some of the blame on us. We are the busy, opinionated generation with all these high moral principles, but sometimes lacking the time to invest, dissect, and implement.

My daughter is now thriving and enjoying her college experience, but part of me still bears this grief.

How did I not see it?

How many years of suffering happened because I missed the problem?

Then guilt joins in:

How could I have spent this much time thinking about my child’s education and not known?

How could I not recognize that she was struggling? Sorry doesn’t cut it. We can’t give time back.

I’ve learned that looks deceive. I had interpreted working around the clock as passion. You simply do that when you love learning.

Maybe that belief kept me blind.

Achievement can disguise struggle.

You can love your child ferociously. You can research. You can advocate. You can pay attention. You can invest time and money. You can believe you are doing everything you’re supposed to do for them and the next generation—and still fail.

Back to Hannah-Jones

In her New York Times article, Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about the battle of advocating against segregated schools and trying to create an equal, common baseline for schoolchildren everywhere. She had to reckon with the fact that schools with inequities based on the complexion of their student body or a lack of a strong tax base don’t always make it up to snuff. Sometimes folks do the bare minimum, not the unpaid extra that can make a difference. Putting middle-class or rich kids into these schools doesn’t automatically change what’s happening.

And she had to trade her fear of putting her kid in a higher-performing school, where rich kids can exhibit both racism and classism, for the opportunity to give her daughter a competitive, quality education.

She thought she was doing the right thing by placing her only daughter, her only child, in her neighborhood public school. She may have been deluded into thinking that the predominantly Black neighborhood school wouldn’t play in her face because she writes for The New York Times.

Unfortunately, she found that some allowed neglect to fester into behavioral issues at lunchtime; she found folders of ungraded schoolwork, which made it harder to ensure a student corrected mistakes and learned. Hannah-Jones’s daughter fell behind and needed many tutoring sessions to catch up.

The Ruby Bridges Interlude

On September 8, Ruby Bridges turned seventy-two. She was the famous six-year-old who, in 1960, became the first Black child to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Federal marshals escorted her past screaming white crowds to get her into the building.

I made a birthday post about her, and more than a hundred thousand people on Instagram (and Facebook) have viewed it.

We know the picture.

The little Black girl.

The white dress.

The braids.

Or maybe we know Norman Rockwell’s rendering of that walk, The Problem We All Live With.

But what I wanted people to remember was what existed outside the frame, beyond the braids and the federal marshals.

Picture the crowd.

The slurs. The angry men and women screaming at her. The death threats. The image of a Black baby doll in a coffin. Ruby had nightmares about that.

White parents who defied the boycott and continued sending their children to William Frantz were threatened too. Federal marshals also escorted white children into the school.

All this chaos because people wanted a better education for their children.

Sometimes history is easier to tolerate when we crop the photograph and look at the child, not the system.

Many of us have had to deal with the system, particularly when it comes to education.

We celebrate that courage now because of the success of school integration. But most of us don’t have the guts or the fearlessness it took to be Ruby—or any of the kids who attended with her.

Back to the New York Times

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an extraordinary and painful essay in The New York Times titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

Please read the whole thing.

Don’t read only a headline. Don’t read a social-media snippet. Don’t even rely on the pieces I’m quoting here. Read the essay.

Hannah-Jones wrestles with something that I think is far more complicated than a debate about public schools, private schools, integration, vouchers, property taxes, or school choice.

She’s wrestling with what happens when our ideals collide with our children.

Hannah-Jones deliberately chose a public-school education for her daughter, Najya, while advocating for educational integration and equality. Looking back years later, she confronted the possibility that her daughter had borne a cost for that decision.

Najya told her:

“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

Wow. She might as well have said that she did not get the education she deserved.

I know that Hannah-Jones had to herself:

Why didn’t I see it?

Hannah-Jones apologized to her daughter and admitted that Najya “had borne the cost not only of our unjust society but also of my ideals.”

That’s a transparent admission.

It holds a lot of grief and what-ifs.

I think we are all okay if our values or busyness cost us something.

We are destroyed when they cost our children.

There’s another little girl from New Orleans, Leona Tate, who integrated McDonogh 19 Elementary School at the same time Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz. She was another of the little Black girls helping to dismantle Jim Crow, but the victory we inherited was purchased partly with their childhoods.

When Hannah-Jones asked Tate about her parents’ decision to put her on that front line, Tate did not condemn them.

She said:

“Somebody had to do it.”

She’s right.

Somebody had to do it.

But I don’t know how any parent can stand by and let their child be miserable for the greater good.

On The View, the ladies discussed Hannah-Jones’s essay, and the conversation quickly exposed how complicated this becomes for actual parents. Sunny Hostin talked about making a different decision for her own children: predominantly white private schools where they excelled academically but encountered racism and struggles around identity. Ana Navarro raised questions about Florida’s voucher system and who can actually afford private-school tuition even with a voucher. Alyssa Farah Griffin talked about choosing public school while also acknowledging that her family chose to live in a well-off community with excellent neighborhood public schools.

Those aren’t identical experiences.

They expose the dilemma.

We want to repair systems.

But we also want to protect our babies.

These two desires will always be on a collision course.

Here are dilemmas I didn’t have the strength for:

If my child could help integrate a school, but she’d be bullied, threatened, psychologically or physically wounded, do I send her?

No.

If my child’s presence could make things better for the children coming ten years later, twenty years later, sixty years later—how much of her childhood am I allowed to spend purchasing that future?

That one, I don’t know.

I simply don’t know.

I want to tell you I would be brave.

I want to tell you my convictions would hold.

I want to tell you I would stand against the darkness and raise a light high enough for everybody behind me to see.

But when it comes to my child?

I’m not a lantern leading the way.

I’m not a flashlight with a steady beam.

I’m barely a candle.

A little one with a flame cupped between two hands, trying desperately to stay lit in the wind.

That’s why I research and write about the women who were lanterns and steady flashlights, who made sacrifices for the race, for women, for all our children.

The Wrap-Up

I understand the argument for equity in the school system. I understand the argument that every place of learning should have excellent teachers, sufficient resources, and genuine expectations for every child. I understand why people advocate for integration, for school choice, for charters, for vouchers, for greater investment in neighborhood schools—and why other people challenge those approaches or their consequences.

Those are public-policy questions, and they deserve serious debate.

But parenting isn’t a policy paper.

Parenting is looking at one particular face.

Your baby’s face.

And catching those eyes.

As for me and this house, my child’s eyes can never hold that type of failure again.

This week’s booklist includes:

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones & The New York Times Magazine

A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry that places slavery and its continuing consequences at the center of the American story—and provides essential context for Hannah-Jones’s thinking about race, opportunity, and education.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum

A foundational examination of racial identity and the psychology of racism, particularly valuable for thinking about what Black children experience while navigating integrated educational spaces.

The Sum of Us: Adapted for Young Readers by Heather McGhee

McGhee examines how racial divisions have shaped American public goods—including schools—and argues that inequality ultimately extracts a cost far beyond the people initially targeted by it.

Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit

Delpit examines the disconnect that can arise between educators and children from different racial and cultural backgrounds and asks what genuinely effective teaching requires

Writer in Residence by Rhonda McKnight. A struggling novelist escapes to the South Carolina Lowcountry hoping to recover her words, only to find romance, buried family secrets, and teaching opportunities.

FoxTale Book Shoppe, has signed copies of Rhonda McKnight’s books on hand.

And FoxTale Book Shoppe has a few signed copies of Fire Sword and Sea and my other titles.

You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.

Hey. Let’s keep rising and creating together. I need you. That’s the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.

Thank you for being here.

I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Merriam-Webster defines dissatisfaction simply as “a lack of satisfaction.” And yes—that’s accurate. But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find another definition, a lack of contentment, a restless aspiration.

Aspire means to breathe in or out, to draw something toward you or release something from within. So dissatisfaction becomes this restless desire to pull something in or push something out—and that restlessness can freeze you in place.

In the writing world, dissatisfaction usually means that I’m staring at the words on the page, and they’re not capturing the story I know I’m supposed to be telling. Something has failed. And now I must go back, line by line, analyzing the bones of the narrative and examine every part of the story structure.

And for my new writers out there, yes a story or novel should have structure, a framework that keeps the momentum and holds the theme together.

In this analysis, I look at each main character—and often the minor ones too. I check their goals. I review their belief systems. I trace the web of their relationships: who cares for whom, who fears them, who hates whom, and who is silently holding the line of loyalty. All of these connections form the living body of the world I’m creating.

And then there is the lie. Every character has one—the bit of disinformation they inherited or bought into, the wound that warped their worldview. It’s the thing they must confront and be healed of. If that lie isn’t strong enough, or the character has drifted too far from it, the story loses its heartbeat. In my process, that’s when the words feel stuck. I struggle with word count. And I must figure out why.

That’s Vanessa’s writing world.

But in the real world, dissatisfaction hits differently. When I feel that restless ache, I have to look at the characters I’m connected to—the real-life individuals doing life with me or choosing to let me do life with them. How are we connected? Are we missing something? Are there obvious signs of hurt or neglect we haven’t addressed?

Or is it the circumstances we’re all tangled in that’s causing problems?

Let’s be honest: the world is heavy right now. Yes, the government may be back to work, but people are still waiting to be reimbursed for the days they’ve labored without pay. Folks who need food assistance are facing real disruptions. And Thanksgiving is approaching—a time when people gather to share a meal, which becomes complicated if there are fractures sitting around the table. It’s hard to taste turkey if you’ve still got beef with somebody sitting across from you.

And yes, Thanksgiving is about turkey. But if you’re carrying beef, that’s another heavy protein to digest.

The truth is, if we don’t figure out why we are dissatisfied, it will take root. It will grow into bitterness—and bitterness is a treacherous ground to stand upon.

Bitterness wedges itself into the cracks of your soul, sets up spikes, and ensures that every movement hurts. Bitterness requires a sweet form of medicine or self-care to heal—or it spreads. Bitterness touches everything you make, everything you attempt, and everyone you care about.

Thanksgiving is my holiday. I inherited it from my mother. It’s a big deal for me. If you follow me on social media, you’ll start seeing the sample menus, the tablescapes, the design choices—all the details I pour myself into. It’s part of my self-care—the joy of gathering: the beauty and connection of family and friends around my table.

But as much as we gather, we all must admit the truth: Covid changed us. Elections bruised us. Hardness, fear, and callousness ruined how we move through the world.

As we head toward 2026, I believe it’s time to turn a new leaf. To be better than we were in 2025. The first step is breaking up the bitter ground and letting healing in.

So here are my steps to stop being bitter:

1. Admit you’re bitter. Say it outright. Bitterness can’t heal if you pretend it isn’t there.

2. Identify the source. What is making you bitter? Name it so you can face it.

3. Avoid the triggers. Just say no to people and actions that put you back into that headspace of vulnerability. And if you can’t avoid them, minimize them. If you can’t minimize them, prepare for them. Pray. You never know when they just might miss a flight.

4. Give up waiting for the apology. This is the hardest one.We hold on to bitterness because we want that moment—where the foul person, falls upon bended knees and says I was so wrong. In romance books, we wait for the grovel: the moment when the hero finally admits how deeply they messed up. And yes, that moment is sweet. But in real life? If you get it at all, it’s a gift. And this moment is not a guarantee, that the beef won’t happen again. Your life must continue either way. Your goals must continue. Your growth must continue.You cannot pause your wholeness on hold waiting for someone else to gain revelation.

And let me be clear: forgiving and moving on does not mean continuing in the harmful cycles. It means releasing the chain around your own ankle. If someone has shown you who they are, you don’t need further confirmation. You don’t need to go back to the well, testing the water again and again.

Vanessa, you are so mature. At my big age of 21+, no I am not. Do I feel trifling sometimes? Absolutely. Do I want to complain the whole way through of releasing bitterness? Yes. But staying in that cycle only deepens the pain. And when I stay connected to that system, the person, or the circumstance, it will hurt me again. I refuse to let it continue to win.

It’s better for me and my soul to forgive and move on.

In Fire Sword and Sea, Jacquotte Delahaye has every reason to be bitter. Life delivers blow after blow to this young woman’s life. But the evidence of that life—her legend, her accomplishments—tells me she never stayed stuck. She didn’t wait for an apology. She picked up a sword. She fought her way to the next moment, the next rung on the ladder, until she became a pirate captain. And she brought her crew—her chosen people—along with her.

If you read Fire Sword and Sea and take away nothing else, take this:Success, particularly shared success, is the way to defeat bitterness.

And for Jacquotte’s example, I am not bitter at all:

This week’s books to reflect upon are:

All About Love by bell hooksA profound meditation on how love—of self, community, and truth—becomes the antidote to bitterness and disconnection.

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi CoatesA lyrical coming-of-age memoir about healing, survival, family, and forging meaning from difficulty.

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee TaylorInvites readers to embrace radical self-love as a path out of resentment, trauma, and social conditioning.

Rest Is Resistance by Tricia HerseyA manifesto urging us to reject grind culture and reconnect with rest, healing, and humanity.

And of course Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley. Caribbean women pirates—Black women pirates join French and Indigenous women to sail the seas. Fire Sword and Sea releases January 13th, 2026. If you’re a librarian, vote for this book now in Library Reads in Edelweiss and NetGalley. Indie Next is voting now too.

This week, I’m highlighting Book People through their website and Bookshop.org .

Consider purchasing Fire Sword and Sea from Book People or one of my partners in the fight, bookstore’s large and small who are in this with me.

We are less two months away the January 13th release. Come on my crew. Let’s get excited.

Show notes include a list of the books mentioned in this broadcast.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com under the podcast link in the About tab.

If you’re on board my ship, press that like button, subscribe and share Write of Passage. Never miss a moment. We have work to do. And I need You.

Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-11-18 14:10:00.